


See-Through

by lunchinanelevator



Category: Good Wife (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M, POV Multiple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-29
Updated: 2013-12-16
Packaged: 2017-12-16 13:58:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 15,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/862798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunchinanelevator/pseuds/lunchinanelevator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cary and Alicia defend Kalinda.<br/>Set after S4; takes place before and after *Denial* in sweetjamielee's "Defended."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Defended](https://archiveofourown.org/works/858953) by [sweetjamielee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sweetjamielee/pseuds/sweetjamielee). 



The dinginess of the interrogation room is already starting to stick to Cary’s clothes: his white cuffs look grayer, his tie ripples in the humidity. The vent above him groans, and he wonders if it’s spraying him with dust too fine to see.

He’s tired. She called him at two, almost an hour ago now, and his body’s reminding him that he can’t hold his liquor like he used to—he’s getting older, faster than he thought he would. He has the feeling he wouldn’t want to see himself in a mirror right now, so he keeps his back to the door and the window, just waiting, just listening.

When an officer, a middle-aged guy with a broad chest, finally steers Kalinda in by the shoulder, Cary sees she’s absorbed some of the dinginess too. She’s still in skirt and boots and blue leather jacket, but there’s something scuffed and off about her, even before Cary fully notices the handcuffs on her wrists. There’s a scratch near Kalinda’s hairline, and a few strands of loose hair lie along her temples. Her skin seems ashy, her usually impeccable makeup looking more like a mask. He suspects most of this has transpired over the last few hours, but since he hasn’t seen or spoken to Kalinda in almost four months, it’s hard to be sure. Her expression is as opaque as usual, and Cary tries not to search her face. He should know by now that he won’t find anything there.

Kalinda sits and lets the officer fasten her to the table, not saying a word. Cary has a strange sense that Kalinda knows this cop, that simply by being in the room with them Cary has become part of an exchange he doesn’t fully understand. The guy’s face is expressionless, matching Kalinda’s, and Cary doesn’t want to think about him; he needs to focus.

The cuffs are too big on Kalinda’s wrists and too small for her to slip her hands out altogether, even with her thumbs tucked in. It’s hard for Cary to look at them, easier to look at her face.

They stare at each other for a while, or at least Cary thinks Kalinda’s looking at him—he can’t really see her pupils. He hears the door shut, and they’re alone, or as alone as they’re going to get tonight.

“Thanks for coming,” Kalinda says quietly.

“What the hell happened, Kalinda? First-degree _murder_?” Now that he feels he’s allowed to speak, Cary can’t quite control the tone of his voice.

“Yeah.”

“Did you—”

He stops abruptly; for the moment, he doesn’t want to know. Kalinda looks at him with the ghost of something that might be amusement, but it vanishes. Cary tries to collect his thoughts, but the next one is just as confusing. “How are you connected to Savarese? How are they connecting you?”

He remembers, with a little shudder of visceral shock, the blows to his gut and his face in the parking lot. _Calvin Klein_. He remembers leaning against the door of his own car, barely able to sit upright, while rain pounded onto the new, slick bruises and he tried to will himself to move, to drive.

_What was that about?_ he longs to ask Kalinda. _Did it have something to do with you?_ But for the moment, he supposes he doesn’t really want to know that either.

Kalinda shrugs.

“What do they have on you?”

Kalinda shrugs again.

“You didn’t ask?”

Kalinda shakes her head.

“How did they …” Cary’s finding it difficult to collect his thoughts. “It’s been months, hasn’t it? I mean, the last time we heard from him … why now?”

Kalinda looks past him. “They found the body.”

Cary bites the inside of his cheek in frustration. He could seriously hit her right now.

She sees the thought cross his face; the change in her expression is miniscule and heartbreaking. 

Cary doesn’t know what to say when Kalinda’s being ridiculous. Business, he supposes. At least she’ll admit she needs information. “Arraignment first thing in the morning. That’s what they told me.”

“Okay.”

“Yeah,” says Cary. It’s hard to get the next words out of his throat, hard to swallow what he knows the next few weeks will look like for Kalinda. “With first degree … you know I probably can’t …”

Kalinda shrugs, going for resigned and not quite making it. “Yeah. I know.”

“I’ll still argue for it.”

“I know.”

“And if we do get it—is there anyone who could help you? With bail?”

Kalinda lifts her chin, as if offended at the very notion.

The same irritation rushes through Cary. “Have it your way. Don’t ask anyone for anything. You can take care of yourself in there, right?”

“Yeah …” Kalinda bites her lip, forgets and tries to raise her hand to tuck her hair behind her ear. The chain on her handcuffs rasps against the steel bar that anchors her to the table. Cary watches Kalinda stare at her wrist for a minute, at her shaking hand, and then she says, “But you—your firm can—can represent me?”

The sudden desperation in her voice startles him, digs in. He wonders, just for a second, why she won’t go to Lockhart/Gardner, why he was the first call. “I’ll do everything I can, Kalinda. You know that. But I could use a little help.”

“Thanks,” she says. Her voice is low.

Cary nods, trying not to show how shaken he is. He guesses if he had to pick one person he knows who would be capable of murder, it would be Kalinda, but he would have assumed equally that if she did murder, no one would ever find out. And the depth of need he hears is equally unsettling. Kalinda doesn't beg. Even in bed (Cary flushes, trying to push back the memory, and once again, as if Kalinda can see inside his head, her face flickers with an amusement that quickly fades) Cary cannot recall her doing much to express needs or desires. Her voice has only sounded like this once before in his life, two years ago, an incongruous phone call digging him out of sleep.

_Cary?_

_Cary, I need some help._

And then it all collides, the insight so sharp he almost sees stars. “Alicia,” he says.

Kalinda raises her head.

“It’s about Alicia,” Cary continues. Kalinda’s eyes are rimmed with red in a way that Cary also doesn’t care to see.

“He was going to hurt her,” Cary says slowly. He understands more than he knows, suddenly, more than he can absorb in this moment. His chest fills with rocks. “And you … stopped him.”

Kalinda blinks, rapidly.

“Jesus.” Cary is seeing just how complicated this is going to be. “Kalinda.”

Kalinda’s gaze is fixed a bit below his ear. She doesn’t move, doesn’t nod, just swallows and sits, eyes deadened and lined with shadows, tension solidifying her shoulders and her neck.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going back to some of my pre-S4 ideas about Nick, because frankly I find it more interesting than anything that happened with him on the show, backstorywise. Comments are so very welcome.

_Well, you got what you wanted._

Being in the Cook County Jail means Nick is with Kalinda constantly. Nick and worse. _You got what you wanted_ , she tells him, trying to stare past the cinderblock walls, past the bars and the barbed wire twenty feet past the windows. The first night here, nearly two weeks ago, she couldn’t stop shaking until morning—it was one of the times she was grateful for her size, when her cellmate didn’t even seem to notice—and although she’s managed to regain equilibrium without revealing much to the jail population at large, the twenty years of the mandatory minimum keep closing in on her peripheral vision. Twenty years if she’s lucky, of course, luckier than she’s been in a very long time.

_Oh, you’re no fun anymore_ , Nick answers, _give up too easy_.

She’s started to suspect that ultimately it’s the sheer boredom that will do her in. She’s not a reader or an athlete, doesn’t have much to say and doesn’t find herself much in the mood for sex, and already the days are long and the nights longer. And there have been a few days, like today, where she does nothing at all, trots where she’s ordered and otherwise sits, stares, thinks of nothing. These days make her think she could manage it, twenty to sixty years, and that frightens her more than anything.

Cary’s occasional visits are the only break in the monotony, and so far he’s had very little good news.

Having Cary see her like this isn’t helping anything. She isn’t sure why she asked him to be her attorney except when she thinks of her arraignment, when she glanced over her shoulder as the court officer was replacing the cuffs and caught Diane’s eye, only for a second. Cary’s disappointment doesn’t feel like that, straight through, but when he visits she’s battered on all sides, desperate for the company and the news and desperate for him to leave.

_Anyway_ , Nick says, _you got what you wanted, too. Didn't you_? He grins at her.

She thought he’d be deader than this. Instead she just carries on conversations, then spends sleepless nights trying to shake Leela from her shoulders.

Today, as she eats lunch silently, staring through anyone who attempts to meet her eye, she’s crossing the border into Michigan, casual in a sweatshirt and blue jeans and hoping that she didn’t smell of gasoline. The calm that had taken over when the fire started was still with her, spread its solidity through every limb; she’d chosen her name already, not the one that was on the falsified license and passport, but she couldn’t get through using Leela Tahiri either. Just one more casual conversation, my sister in Dearborn, my nephew on a day trip, and everything would be different.

_You never were much of a runner, baby._

She’s back in her cell, not quite sure of how she got there. She thinks her current cellmate’s name is Manesha, but she’s not really sure, and anyway she’s not here, TV or basketball or something. It probably wouldn’t hurt Kalinda to go watch TV, break up this memory, but it’s got her pinned to her bunk now. Nick was in prison himself then, the injustice of it searing Leela—all they knew about was dealing, what did that matter compared to what he really did? And no one would know, Leela herself couldn’t be the one to tell them, and it was too late anyway, already too late for it to matter.

“Sharma.”

Kalinda looks up.

“Your attorney’s here.”

Kalinda nods.

“You don’t talk much.”

“No,” Kalinda agrees. This is a new CO, someone she doesn’t know, and it’s best to play along until she figures him out. She’s been fortunate with personnel so far, but she’s not fooling herself—that’s just been luck, nothing more. She knows she’s completely at their mercy, and that will only get worse when they transfer her to Dwight after the verdict, and given her pride, it’s only a matter of time before she’s in danger. She guesses part of her knows how to live like this; she guesses she’s done it before.

Kalinda rises and follows the CO down the hall, through layers of doors. She feels hideously vulnerable in jail uniform, misses her boots every time her foot comes down.

The dreams had started before Nick went to prison, got worse and worse after. Different means for murder presented themselves to her in sleep night after night, and the days until the end of his sentence were ticking by, faster and faster. He’d be in her home again, in her bed, and she didn’t know if she’d be able to bear it.

The CO puts his hand on the small of her back and steers her into the empty visiting room.

It’s Alicia, not Cary.

Kalinda wouldn’t even step through the door if not for the CO behind her. She supposes she knew Alicia was working her case as well, but Cary should have warned her. He’s brought Robyn with him once or twice, which was bad enough, but for Alicia to see her like this—

The CO steps away, and Kalinda hears the door scrape shut behind her, feels him watching through the tiny reinforced window set into the steel. She and Alicia look at each other, and then Alicia tucks her reaction in quickly, as she always does, and gestures to the seat across from her. Kalinda sits.

“I’m sorry,” Alicia says. “I wanted to see you sooner.”

There’s nothing to say, so Kalinda doesn’t speak.

Alicia waits, then continues. “We got the last of the discovery materials this morning.” She hesitates.

“It’s bad,” Kalinda says.

“We haven’t been through everything yet, but yes. So far, it’s bad.” Alicia waits. “The decomp is the main thing on our side, though, and the more we can say about your relationship, the better. We need to offer alternate explanations for the forensic evidence.”

“Can you bring it here? The files?”

“Yes, I think so.” Alicia nods. “I guess I should have brought it now. I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“No, you should have,” says Kalinda. She doesn’t know what to do with the information, but it’s just as well she has it.

“This week.”

“When’s the—trial date?”

“Three weeks. Jury selection the twenty-first and twenty-second, opening statements on the twenty-fifth.” Alicia pauses, seems to make a decision. “Kalinda, I wish—I could have helped, then. I wish you’d told me sooner.”

“Told you what?”

Alicia rolls her eyes. Kalinda looks to the left of Alicia’s head.

“Kalinda, anything you can tell us now about his past—about your marriage—”

After several months of committing murder as she slept, the waking Leela had started reading about arson instead. She’d learned what would tip arson investigators off, figured out for herself how to keep things ambiguous, keep anyone from looking too closely. Slowly the methods of murder faded, but another face started appearing in her dreams again, two versions of it, one smooth against Leela’s own, the other bruised and distorted; she would have to get as far away from Toronto as she could, she realized, no reminders. If any of it were going to work at all.

“Kalinda.”

“Huh?”

_That’s right, baby. Stay with me._ He raises an eyebrow, grins again. Kalinda swallows bile.

Alicia’s face has that searching quality, almost the way it used to back when they were friends, before Alicia knew. Kalinda wants to hide from it, would give anything for a door that she herself could shut. “Are you okay?”

Kalinda nods.

Alicia shakes her head. “What can I do?”

“What you’re doing.” Kalinda waits, just a second. “I wish I could …” She has no idea how to complete that sentence.

“But—for you? Can I do anything for you?”

That stymies Kalinda. Aside from “don’t find out,” “don’t hate me,” and, more recently, “don’t die,” she’s never been all that clear on what she wants from Alicia. She studies the walls, the webs of cracks in the cement, the blurry fluorescent lighting buzzing above Alicia’s face.

“I’m fine, Alicia. I mean … you know. I’m all right.”

She watches Alicia decide not to say anything about it. “We’ll be back in a couple of days,” is what she finally says. “Cary and I. With the trial strategy.”

“Yeah.”

“Kalinda …”

Kalinda shakes her head. Alicia stands, and the CO opens the door for her. Kalinda listens to her heels walk down the hall, doesn’t move until she hears one of the doors open, letting Alicia back into the world.


	3. Chapter 3

“Enough,” Alicia moans, shoving a file away from her, abruptly snapping the laptop shut.

Sifting through the mountain of evidence from the State’s Attorney has been miserable for Alicia, not only because it makes it abundantly clear how screwed they are and how very, very screwed Kalinda might be as a result, but also because the late nights they’ve been putting in (this isn’t the kind of pro bono case that Legal Aid supports, and as such, she and Cary are simply conducting the business late at night, basically off the books, paying Robyn’s extra hours out of pocket) remind her too much of the early days of working—working at Lockhart/Gardner, working with Kalinda. She remembers the pleasure of discovering their new friendship while dark glass hallways surrounded the conference room.

Sitting back, calmly planning her cross-examinations, and waiting for Kalinda to crack the case.

Alicia sighs. Cary does her the favor of not chastising her for her outburst, presumably because he feels similarly. Instead, he simply closes his own manila folder, looking down at it and then at Alicia.

“It’s just so _neat_ ,” he sighs.

He means the crime scene. Well, not the crime scene, the site of discovery—the impeccable choice of location, precluding the discovery of the body until late spring, is really only the beginning. Alicia nods. “Not exactly lack of premeditation.”

“With Kalinda?” He rolls his eyes. “Who the hell knows.”

Alicia giggles. It’s true—if anyone could conceal a body from discovery for seven months without even planning it, it would certainly be Kalinda. She keeps laughing as she pictures it—somehow the idea of Kalinda spreading out a tarp before folding Nick Savarese’s body into her trunk, not leaving even a trace of forensic evidence, seems incredibly comical at this moment. Carefully brushing off her license plate, not even looking back as she slams it shut. Right now it looks like a cartoon in Alicia’s mind, and she laughs and laughs. Cary looks at her incredulously for a moment, but it’s not long before he starts laughing too. The noose of the last two weeks loosens around them.

“I asked Robyn to look into his background,” Cary says when their breath eases again. “Savarese’s.”

“Kalinda’s going to hate that.”

“Yes. She is.”

“But good. We need it.”

“I still can’t believe she was _married_ to him.” Cary sighs again.

“She didn’t want me to tell you,” Alicia says. “Because you were sleeping together, I guess.” She throws it down as if it’s casual.

“We weren’t,” Cary says, answering as if it’s casual. He looks cautiously at Alicia. “I mean, not then. We … Only once.”

“Why only once?” Immediately, Alicia’s ashamed; it’s none of her business.

“I don’t think … I was what she was looking for.”

Alicia hears Cary’s evasion and chooses to ignore it. She busies her fingers with a stack of files, but she’s still reluctant even to open them.

“Have you ever done this before?” Cary asks.

“Done what?”

“Defended someone you … care about.”

“My son,” Alicia says instantly, remembering the weird near-hysteria of Zach’s arrest on the highway. The court case had seemed like it was spinning around her, a tornado ready to obliterate her son’s future, the tenuous remains of her family life. Cary had been pretty helpful then, too.

“Right. But that was …”

“I know. Not the same.”

They stare at the evidence spread across their conference room table.

“And Kalinda, before,” Alicia remembers. “A couple of times.”

“Right,” says Cary. “You did pretty well by her then.”

Alicia shakes her head. “She mostly just … did well by herself.”

Cary laughs, short and quiet.

“And this is different, anyway,” Alicia says. “This … this is her _life_ , Cary.”

“I know.” Cary shakes his head. “I just thank God every day she didn’t do it in Indiana.”

Alicia nods vigorously and shudders. Knowing that most of the rest of Kalinda's life is in their hands is bad enough; the thought of Kalinda on death row makes her physically ill. She has seen Kalinda in jail before this, of course—as Cary has—but seeing her the way she is now, in jail garb as if permanently ensconced behind bars, with Alicia helpless to free her at the moment, is completely different, has compelled Alicia to truly imagine Kalinda a convict, chained and flanked by COs as doors that will not open for another thirty years shut behind her. Her response to it, both times she’s gone to talk to Kalinda, has been sharp and painful, a splinter in her chest.

“And she probably thought of that,” Alicia says softly, now, in response to Cary. “Because … she did do it. Right?”

Cary meets her eyes. “I think we have to … proceed as if she did.”

Alicia sighs. Not that they hadn’t said it before, but it feels different with the evidence, the reality in front of them. A month ago, after the arraignment, she’d had a similar conversation with Will, who caught her as she left the office and said, furiously, “You couldn’t have called me?”

“What?”

“Suddenly you two are the only people who care about Kalinda?” Will snapped. “Leaving everything else aside, Alicia, you at least owe me the professional courtesy. She is our firm’s goddamn in-house. It’s just luck Diane even heard.”

“Will, I just found out today myself. I—I assumed she’d gotten word to you. Or that Cary had.”

She wasn’t entirely sure she believed herself, but it seemed Will believed her. He leaned against the building, looking past Alicia, and seemed suddenly defeated. “Then—let me know if you need any help,” he’d said, a little hoarse.

“What?”

“It has to be off the books, I mean, Diane has to distance herself from this. But both of us are—whatever you need.”

“Sure,” Alicia said uncertainly. “Thank you.”

Will sighed. “I think she would have told me if she didn’t do it.”

Alicia shakes her head, dismissing the memory, and reopens her laptop with another sigh. Slowly, the collage of crime scene photos pixellates again on her screen. 

Six months of decomp— _how the hell did you hide him?_ —have been brutal on the body. It’s more a skeleton now, the neck at an odd angle, the clothing mainly disintegrated, the tree trunk that it leans against still a little stained despite weathering the legion of February snowstorms.

Alicia doesn’t think anyone deserves to die, or be dead, like that.

Instead of slamming her screen down again, Alicia gets up and paces the conference room. Cary wisely doesn’t look up from the documents he’s reviewing, just lets Alicia circle, pounding her confusion into the floor. Niggling the back of her brain are Cary’s words, Cary’s observation from the very beginning. _For you. I talked to her, I figured it out._

_I didn’t want this_ , Alicia answers him, answers Kalinda, fiercely. _I didn’t ask for this. How dare you put this man’s body on my hands?_


	4. Chapter 4

“Goodnight, honey. I love you.” Alicia slips the phone back into her blazer pocket and returns to the table, where Cary is studying their notes on the jurors.

“Not all bad,” he says in greeting, wondering briefly what it would be like to have children and do this job. Cary already feels like his brain and heart are full to bursting, like fear or information might start leaking out of his ears, and when he imagines returning to his empty apartment, even at three in the morning, he feels nothing but relief. “I like number eight and number … you know the guy I mean …”

“The banker? The black guy?” Alicia says. Cary nods. “Seven.”

“Right,” Cary says. “And I think we’ll have number twelve as soon as we explain Savarese was a drug dealer, and she seems like someone who could influence the rest of them. And I’m pretty sure number three is a lesbian.”

“So?”

“So it’s Kalinda. You know. It might help.”

“Well, I also think most of the men were straight, Cary.” Alicia rolls her eyes. “And anyway … don’t you feel like she’s kind of …?”

Cary shakes his head, but he knows what Alicia means. The Kalinda who sat between them today after five steady weeks behind bars, writing listless notes about potential jurors on Alicia’s legal pad, didn’t feel like the woman they know. The tailored navy dress they had brought from her apartment for courtroom proceedings didn’t seem to embrace her the way her clothing always did; there were dull gray bags beneath her eyes and a dull gray glaze over her pupils. She didn’t seem the sort of person who could charm a drunken businessman at a bar, much less a jury of her peers.

“If we ask her to seduce them, she will,” he says, with a determination Alicia surely hears as false.

“I hope so,” is all she says.

Cary nods. “I kind of want to hire one of those jury whisperers we used to get at Lockhart/Gardner.”

“We can’t afford it.”

“I know.”

“Plus I think Kalinda would kill you.”

Both of them look down; that’s not quite as funny as it used to be.

“Can we do this, Cary?” Alicia says quietly.

Cary shrugs, much more casually than he feels. “Well, we have to.”

They open their laptops glumly, ready to work through another night. Though seven months is enough to cast reasonable doubt on some of the forensics, it’s hard to argue that anyone besides Kalinda touched Savarese before his murder. (Cary thinks about the Kalinda who lay with her chin on his naked chest, postcoital and deliciously satisfied, raising one eyebrow after the other, back and forth, to make him laugh.) After weighing for a long time the relative merits of pitting a brown-skinned woman against a white man, even such a lowlife white man as Savarese seems to have been, they’ve gone with self-defense. They introduced the strategy to Kalinda gradually, thinking she’d recoil, but Kalinda seems to lack the energy to recoil at anything. (Cary kisses the line of Kalinda’s neck, rests his cheek in the softness of her thigh.) She simply nods along with their strategy. No pride, not even the kind of pointless pride Cary saw on the night of her arrest.

Cary wonders how much truth there is in their strategy. There must be something to it—Kalinda was barely recognizable when the guy was around—but no matter what Kalinda has or hasn’t said, no matter what Alicia has or hasn’t acknowledged …

 _The truth doesn’t make a good story_ , he reminds himself sternly. _The truth doesn’t make a good defense_. It’s not worth a fight with either woman, not now.

“What does Matan have?” Alicia says suddenly. 

“A lust for revenge?” Cary says. Matan Brody has been acting like he has some kind of ace up his sleeve, but Cary kind of thinks that’s just his typical courtroom demeanor.

“What did Kalinda ever do to him?” Alicia says innocently, earning a snort from both of them. In spite of her idiocy, her refusal to acknowledge the place she seems to have in Kalinda’s constellation and the relationship she might have to this murder, Cary is glad he’s working with Alicia. He’s not sure that anyone else could make him laugh during this case.

“It’s more what I did to him, I think,” he says.

“And me. And Peter.” Alicia looks down. “I don’t want that to hurt Kalinda. Maybe Will and Diane should have …”

“They couldn’t,” Cary says. “It’d kill Lockhart/Gardner. It already is.” That’s true enough. The link between their old employer and still another alleged murderer has even driven a couple of corporate clients to the offices of Florrick, Agos, and Associates. Cary can’t say he’s unhappy about it, but he does feel something for Will Gardner, who in spite of his sleazeball tendencies seems to really care about Kalinda.

“I just don’t want to—She needs the best defense right now. I don’t want her to be …”

“We can handle Matan,” Cary says. “We have before.”

A small cough in the doorway makes them both look up.

“I’ve been standing here for the last five minutes,” Robyn says.

She’s holding a notebook, a coffee cup and a laptop, which she only attempts to balance for a second before depositing all three on the conference table. She has an odd Mona Lisa smile on her face as she stares at her employers.

“What?” Cary finally says.

“I found out a lot.”

“Good stuff?”

“Maybe.”

“What?” Alicia says.

“Well, you guys know her name isn’t really Kalinda, right?”

“No,” says Cary.

“Yes,” says Alicia.

Cary looks at her, more surprised than he probably should be.

“It’s a long story,” Alicia says with a sigh. “But she’s—she’s Leela something, really.”

“Tahiri,” says Robyn. “I mean—this really looks like her.” She holds out a grainy printout of a photograph; it looks like a mug shot to Cary. He looks at Robyn, asking the question with his eyes, and she nods. “She was a juvenile, though, when this happened.”

“Does this matter?” Cary says. “To the murder.”

“I don’t know. It could,” Robyn says. “The thing is, Nick Savarese was pretty—active in Toronto at the time, he’s a little older than she is? I found a lot of references to his being involved with a girl named Leela. No one knew much about her.”

“Okay …”

“So Nick Savarese is having a thing with this Leela,” Robyn says. “It’s been going on a while. He goes on trial for distribution, gets convicted, and just around the time he’s going to prison this body shows up.”

She shows Alicia and Cary a photo on her laptop. They stare at the photo, then at each other. Though different in every other respect, the body onscreen is posed almost exactly like Savarese’s.

Cary swallows. “You don’t think …”

“Kalinda didn’t do it,” Robyn says quickly.

Alicia says, her voice quiet and tight, “How do you know?”

“Because whoever did this was a lot taller than she was, according to the case file at the time,” Robyn answers, gesturing to the screen. “Based on some of the forensic evidence, they actually questioned Nick Savarese about it. She would have been killed right before he was arrested.”

“But?”

“No weapon found, and they couldn’t come up with a motive.”

“Robyn,” says Cary. “Can you tell us the point?”

Robyn opens the notebook to a sheaf of documents that she’s stuffed inside. “The interview with the mother, over here.”

Alicia pulls her chair close to Cary’s and they read together, but apparently Alicia is a faster reader and a faster thinker. She waits for Cary to finish and when he looks up, her eyes are glittering.

He looks at her, uncertain. “What? I mean, it’s horrible, but—”

“No, Cary, we can use it.”

Cary stares at her.

“Robyn’s right, she didn’t do it, but if he—It’s awful, but we might even be right, and if we—”

“We?” Cary doesn’t understand what Alicia’s talking about, not yet, but Robyn’s nodding, biting her lip in an annoyingly Kalindaish fashion, and Alicia has that steely look she always gets before she destroys the prosecution. He remembers it from back when he was the prosecution.

“Okay,” he says, pulling the printouts from the case file out of Robyn’s notebook. “Talk me through it.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please excuse how lurid this is. I really didn't know how else to write this story.

Kalinda sits, tucks her hair behind her ears, and watches Alicia rise from the defense table. Kalinda is rigid with tension and she loathes Alicia and Cary’s strategy, hates the portrayal of herself as a prototypical victim of abuse, the stereotypes they’re trying to play to. She thinks she’s played the role, though, looked surprised or afraid or regretful at all the right places, allowed herself to appear a little more scared than she’d actually like anyone to see. A few sidelong glances at the jury, professional assessment, make her think it wasn’t a terrible idea.

Still, Kalinda’s spent enough time in court to know that this case could go either way, to understand the weight of her testimony. The judge doesn’t like her, she’s made that pretty clear, but Alicia and Cary, ever risk-averse, have been polite and deferential, and the case still belongs to the jury. Kalinda needs them to feel like they understand her before the afternoon is out. Like they could have been her, the same threats, the same desperation.

She slips under oath like slipping into a lake, nothing around her now but the water. Alicia’s wearing a steel-gray suit, crafted as impeccably as usual, trim around her shoulders and her waist.

“Can you please explain the nature of your relationship with Mr. Savarese, Ms. Sharma?”

“I was, um, involved with him. Romantically.” That’s part of the deal: they have to leave Leela Tahiri, and therefore the actual marriage, out of it. Cary and Alicia don’t figure the prosecution really has the budget to send investigators to Canada, and as long as they admit enough, they’re probably safe.

“What was the duration of this relationship?”

“I became involved with him when I was sixteen.” Kalinda avoids Will’s and Lana’s eyes among the spectators, relieved that Diane’s stopped attending the trial. This is humiliating, every step of it. “Our relationship ended when he went to prison a few years later, and I didn’t see him for seven years after that. When he came to Chicago, he …” She wets her lips. “We became involved again.”

“Why?” says Alicia.

Kalinda sighs, shoots a theatrically anxious look just below the edge of the jury box. “I wish I knew,” she says quietly. “I don’t understand how. I didn’t want to be with him again, but it just seemed …” She tries to tell at least some of the truth. “Once he was here it was—difficult to be away from him.”

Methodically, Alicia draws out of Kalinda a picture of Nick’s cruelties, of Kalinda’s fears. Kalinda doesn’t dare to watch the jury, but she glances up occasionally at Cary’s face, which gives her nothing at all. She wonders if it might not be a little more powerful to have a man—a blond, white man, picture-perfect—asking her these questions, increasing her perceived discomfort, but she supposes that’s the sort of thing she should really just leave to the lawyers.

They come around to the night of what Alicia wants to frame as Nick’s attack. There’s no forensics to contradict it, not at this point, so Kalinda mentions his crack use—it was Cary’s idea to use crack, rather than cocaine, to mark Nick, give Kalinda the upper hand in terms of class, and from the buzz among the jurors Kalinda thinks he was probably right—and makes herself sound evasive about the violence that came with it. “I didn’t know—what else to do,” she says quietly.

From the corner of her eye she notices Matan Brody stir, ready to ask how Kalinda came to handle the body so well, hide it so carefully. Cary prepped her on this for more than an hour, and Kalinda is ready. She waits for Alicia to bring it to a close.

“And incidentally, Ms. Sharma,” says Alicia, turning back from the defense table in a slow, casual fashion, “while you were involved with Mr. Savarese in Toronto, were you acquainted with a Rosa Vallejas?”

Kalinda’s head snaps up. She stares at Alicia. “What?”

“Rosa Vallejas. Did you know her?”

“Objection,” says Matan. “Relevance.”

“That will be clear shortly, Your Honor. Please give us a couple of minutes.”

“Overruled.”

“Ms. Sharma, were you acquainted with Rosa Vallejas in Toronto?”

Kalinda looks at Cary, who just cocks his head towards Alicia and raises his eyebrows. Kalinda’s pulse pounds in her ears, her wrists, her throat.

“Yes,” she says, swallowing. “I was.”

“How old were you when you made Ms. Vallejas’s acquaintance?”

“I—I was seventeen.”

“And what was the nature of your relationship?”

Alicia’s face is as still and impassive as it’s been throughout the proceedings. In Kalinda’s mind Leela is catching Rosa’s eye, two brown girls in a sea of slightly-older, mostly-white men and a few brash, resentful, slightly-older wives. Leela felt recognized, immediately, the other girl’s warmth and beauty hitting her from across the room.

“We—were friends,” Kalinda says. Alicia waits, that same stiff face. “We were close friends.”

“How close?”

Kalinda searches Alicia’s eyes for some scrap of humanity. _Please don’t do this_. Alicia just waits.

“We were lovers.”

“For how long were you lovers?”

“Two years.” Kalinda’s breathing so hard, and trying so hard to hide it, that she can barely work the words out of her throat.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Sharma,” says the judge. “I didn’t catch that.”

“Two years,” Kalinda repeats.

“Were you also involved with Mr. Savarese during that time, as would be consistent with your earlier testimony?”

“Yeah,” Kalinda says. Alicia waits. “I was.”

“And was Mr. Savarese aware of your relationship with Ms. Vallejas?”

Kalinda opens her mouth and then closes it.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Sharma, I can’t quite hear you.”

Well, that’s Alicia’s problem. Kalinda can hardly hear Alicia, she can hardly hear herself, she doesn’t want to hear herself, she doesn’t want to hear anything. “Not at first. Later on.”

“How later on? How long had you been seeing Ms. Vallejas when he found out? Six months, a year?”

“A year and a half.”

“And what was his response when he learned of your relationship?”

“Objection, Your Honor. We’re talking about actions that took place, what, ten years ago?”

“I intend to demonstrate their relevance shortly, Your Honor.”

“I’ll allow, Mr. Brody. But Mrs. Florrick, please get to the point.”

Alicia gives a brisk nod. Kalinda hates her. “How did Mr. Savarese respond, Ms. Sharma, when he learned of your affair?”

Kalinda breathes shakily. For just a minute it’s almost a relief to focus on Nick’s face, instead of feeling Rosa’s cheek against Leela’s ear, against her thigh. “He wasn’t happy.” She stays, just for a second, at the point where she could have kept it all from happening. “He told me I had to, we had to stop.”

“But you didn’t end your relationship with Ms. Vallejas then.”

“No.”

“Of course. Because you said your relationship lasted two years. Why did it end, Ms. Sharma?”

If Kalinda runs out of this room right now, they’ll overpower her. She knows this and weighs her options, thinks a fractured ribcage and solitary confinement might be an improvement. But she can’t even will her mouth to move, much less her limbs.

“Ms. Sharma.” The coldness in Alicia’s voice is so powerful that Kalinda is sure Alicia has been storing it up for years, waiting to use it.

“It ended because she was killed.”

Alicia turns to Cary and nods, and Cary clicks on a slide that Kalinda cannot, cannot, allow herself to see.

“This is a Toronto Police Department photograph of Rosa Vallejas’s body, which was discovered in a field several miles from the city,” Alicia says, still her trial voice, this is still a trial. “Nick Savarese, who had recently been convicted of distribution—”

“Your Honor! Is there a question here?”

Alicia answers, and the judge makes a ruling; Kalinda can’t hear it, only the rushing sound in her own ears.

Alicia asks Kalinda a question she can hardly hear, and she can’t hear her own answer at all.

She feels layers of sweat between her skin and her clothing, feels the room tilt around her.

The body is still up on the screen, in far worse shape than Nick’s ever was. Kalinda grips the edges of the stand, stares at her hands with determination. But she doesn’t need to look at it to remember it, to remember Leela finding it, exactly where she and Rosa had planned to meet, where they often met. Nick must have followed her, then; Nick must have followed her multiple times. Kalinda is watching Leela weeks earlier in that same field, listening to Rosa, feeling Rosa kiss her, and she is still answering Alicia’s questions somehow and she hasn’t heard a word, she hates Alicia and she doesn’t want to hear a word and there is nowhere she can be right now, and this room is full and teeming and every time Kalinda opens her mouth she is afraid her heart will pour out of her throat. She closes her eyes because she has to, because she can’t do this anymore.

“Thank you, Ms. Sharma.”

It’s over.

Kalinda’s eyes open again.

But no, it isn’t over. Kalinda can’t even disguise her horror as she watches Matan Brody rise for the cross-examination.

Then the judge says something that Kalinda can’t hear. She’s still holding onto the witness stand, not looking at Alicia or Cary, her ears still filled with rushing noises.

The bailiff comes towards Kalinda. The judge must have called for a recess, then, which means what it’s meant throughout the trial, a dehumanizing return to the holding cell for an hour or two. That suits Kalinda; she has no interest in being human at the moment. It’s hard not to jerk back from his grip, but she manages. It will get her out of this room. It’s the only thing that will.

Before the cell door is even locked behind her she’s bent double over the brushed steel toilet, and she’s still shaking violently when she finally leans back against the cement wall, which tilts behind her and around her, the sour scent of bile pervading the air. Her ribs tremble with every breath.

Thankfully, Cary and Alicia don’t come back to see her. Thankfully, for the better part of three hours, no one does.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All right. I reserve the right not to post for a few weeks now. But please, please, tell me what you think!

“Will the defendant please rise?”

The three of them rise as one, the top of Kalinda’s head just above the level of Alicia’s shoulder. Alicia tries to catch Kalinda’s eye, but Kalinda’s staring straight ahead in that same deadeyed way that she had for Matan Brody’s cross-examination, for his closing argument and Cary’s.

“Have you reached a verdict?”

The direct questioning exhausted Alicia, and she’d had to turn objections over to Cary during the cross-examination. Matan seemed, as they had intended, defanged by how vicious Alicia’s questioning had been; though they hadn’t anticipated this, he also seemed thrown by Kalinda’s affectlessness, the clear signs of trauma. It wasn’t what he expected of Kalinda Sharma, and he clearly believed it was all staged.

But nevertheless, from Alicia’s point of view, Matan was pretty effective regarding the placement of the body, hitting a couple of the jurors, and Alicia’s not sure Cary compensated adequately for it in the closing. It had to be him, not her, but she thinks given the chance she might have summed it up a little better. She doesn’t know how this is going to go. She thinks back to all the murder trials she’s presided over. This is worse, much worse.

“We have, Your Honor.”

Unable to get Kalinda’s attention, Alicia settles for meeting Cary’s eyes instead, and is relieved to see he’s as terrified as she is. She’s not sure how well any of them, Kalinda herself least of all, will weather an appeals process.

Kalinda doesn’t look any better than she did yesterday. Her shoulders curl beneath the stiff seams of her jacket; her face is drawn, and she’s swallowing repeatedly, the breaths Alicia can hear sharp and short. She wants to reach for Kalinda’s hand, as she would—and has—for many clients in similar circumstances, but she doesn’t think it’s what Kalinda wants.

“On the charge of murder in the first degree, how do you find?”

“We find the defendant not guilty.”

Alicia is still holding her breath, doesn’t dare to look at her client or co-counsel.

“On the charge of murder in the second degree, how do you find?”

“We find the defendant not guilty.”

The room fills with the rush of whispers.

If Kalinda were anyone else, Alicia would embrace her now, but Kalinda’s sunk into the chair beneath her, exactly as Alicia imagines she might have had the verdict gone the other way, saying nothing, doing nothing, revealing nothing. Alicia meets Cary’s eyes again, and they reflect the same bottomless relief she feels. Parts of her that have been coiled tight for the last eight weeks loosen suddenly, all at once. She feels oddly close to tears.

The judge doesn’t look thrilled with this outcome, but Alicia can tell she’s not about to do anything ridiculous. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, thank you for your service,” she says. A pause, and then, “Ms. Sharma, you are free to go.”

Matan shoots them a sour look—it’s clear the loss, to Kalinda again, to Cary again, is deeply personal. Alicia smiles a little to herself as Cary glares back at Matan, and wants suddenly to share the humor with Kalinda, but Kalinda doesn’t seem even to notice the exchange. She’s staring at the witness stand, ignoring the sounds of the courtroom emptying behind her.

Out of the corner of her eye, Alicia notices Will start towards them, then change his mind and turn away, reaching for his phone as he leaves the courtroom. A few rows away from his seat is that FBI agent, the “flexible” one. She seems to be waiting for Kalinda, but after looking at Kalinda’s immobile back for a while, she, too, gives up and leaves.

Cary and Alicia watch Kalinda stare for a while before Cary touches her shoulder and says quietly, “Hey. Sharma. You’re a free woman.”

Kalinda stands abruptly and leaves the room, slipping through the milling stragglers as if they weren’t even there.

Cary and Alicia look at each other for a second, and then Alicia, impulsively, turns on her heel and follows Kalinda. The crowd isn’t as easy for her to navigate, somehow, but when she gets out of the courtroom she sees Kalinda off to her left, bypassing a crowd of journalists.

Alicia follows behind her for a full flight of stairs and half a hallway. When they’ve left the reporters and spectators behind completely, she calls out, “Hey. Kalinda.”

Kalinda stops and pivots. Everything in the hallway stills.

“Go to hell, Alicia,” Kalinda says, voice low and dangerous. Alicia has never heard her voice like this.

“You’re _welcome_ , Kalinda.”

Kalinda whirls again and rounds a corner. Alicia follows, overwhelmed by the hostility but refusing to accept it, refusing to go under. They’re in a corridor near some of the ADAs’ offices before Alicia’s able to catch up and grab Kalinda’s shoulder.

Kalinda looks down at Alicia’s hand and shrugs it off forcefully, meeting her eyes with an icy glare. “Please don’t touch me.” 

Alicia keeps a hand on Kalinda’s arm.

Kalinda slaps it away, a red mark rising on Alicia’s skin. It doesn’t hurt, but Alicia’s shocked. She stares at Kalinda.

“I didn’t ask for that, Alicia,” Kalinda says, breath heavy around the words. “I didn’t agree to any of that.”

Alicia doesn’t have to wonder what she means. She says quietly, “You asked for the best defense we could give you.”

“That was malpractice.”

“Then sue us.”

“I had a right to know what that defense was going to be!”

“Did you notice that you just got acquitted?”

“Right. Yeah,” says Kalinda. “Thank you.”

“What?” Alicia growls, furious herself now. She’s sick of this, Kalinda the solo superhero, assuming that her manipulations can control the world. Anytime Alicia has tried to help her she’s undermined the process every step of the way. Alicia had perfectly good reasons not to give her the chance to do that here. “Were you seeing someone in jail? Did you want to stay?”

“I wanted my _life_ back, Alicia!”

“You don’t kill someone and then just _get your life back_!” Alicia snaps. “That isn’t how it works!”

“Oh, I know that,” Kalinda says. Her tone is so icy, it takes Alicia a moment to notice the tears streaking down Kalinda’s cheeks as she speaks. “Do you think I didn’t know that? That I just don’t understand? I know how to live my life! I made my life! I know how it works!”

“Good job getting charged with _first-degree murder_! That certainly _worked_!”

“Yes, and _you’re_ welcome, Alicia!”

Alicia feels her lips part, her mouth open. She hears thudding in her chest. She stares at Kalinda.

“I know you and Cary—you think you—think you _know_ me now.” By now Kalinda is really crying, the words slipping metallically through tears. Alicia stares at her, transfixed. “If you _know_ all that, can’t you at least—” Kalinda takes a harsh breath “—at least understand that I was _right_?”

She seems to be waiting for Alicia to say something, but Alicia can’t think of a single word. Standing up suddenly seems difficult, so Alicia leans against the nearest wall, beside a bulletin board. She can’t take her eyes off Kalinda, this tear-streaked, exhausted, beaten-down version of Kalinda, and she’s trying to remember how to breathe.

“I have to go reclaim my things,” Kalinda says quietly. She brushes past Alicia, walking carefully so as not to touch her, face still slick with tears.


	7. Chapter 7

Cary’s just about to check his phone again when Alicia slips onto the barstool beside him, her blazer already off and slung over her shoulder. She’s clearly familiar with the bartender, because when she flashes two fingers he brings two shots of tequila, smoothly, no pause for a question. When Alicia downs the second one in as many minutes, Cary raises an eyebrow, taking a sip from his own glass as he does.

“You were right,” Alicia says, quiet and without pretense, gesturing again to the bartender.

“I was right about what?”

“She killed for me.”

Cary whistles. “She told you that?”

“Yes.”

They sit in silence; Cary finishes his bourbon, and Alicia downs a third tequila shot. The bar is subdued—it’s a Tuesday night, after all—but it still seems to Cary that pretty much anyone in this room is having more fun than he is.

“Do you think it’s true?” Alicia says. “Do you think he would have killed me?”

“Honestly, no, Alicia. I don’t.” Cary wants to have another conversation, or no conversation at all. This was a tough case; if they can’t have celebration, he thinks a little peace and quiet is not too much to ask. “Because you’re not an undocumented eighteen-year-old Guatemalan lesbian with no family connections, and I think he was smart enough to figure that out. I think he was probably a little surprised when he saw the kind of people she was connected to now.”

Alicia looks a little thunderstruck by this assessment, though that might also be the tequila. “That’s why Peter,” she says quietly.

“What?”

Alicia shakes her head. “Nothing.”

“Yeah,” says Cary, processing her words, “that’s probably why.”

Alicia looks at him—clearly, she hadn’t realized he knew about Kalinda and Peter. This annoys Cary for some reason. In fact, Cary’s a little irritated by the air of secrecy Alicia’s had throughout this entire case, as if she’s the only one who knows any of the truth about Kalinda or has the right to know it. He probably would have done things differently after Kalinda’s arrest if he knew her name was an alias. It’s just luck that the SA’s office never pursued it.

“Now do I think he would have wanted to kill you,” says Cary, “is another question.” That doesn’t sound right; he’s a little drunk. The bartender grabs Cary’s empty glass and puts down a full one, then raises his eyebrows towards Alicia. When Cary nods, the bartender places another tequila shot in front of her. “And do I think Kalinda understood all that, can really understand all that after everything that—happened to her—is another one.”

“Do you think we hurt her?”

Cary nearly spits out a mouthful of bourbon. “Yes, Alicia, I think we hurt her.”

“But—really?”

“Yes. Really.” Cary is cranky. He misses the State’s Attorney’s office, where when you won a case all you’d done was put away some bad guys. “Moral clarity,” he’d called it once in conversation with Kalinda, and Kalinda didn’t let it go for months.

A few days ago, when he first started daring to imagine this evening, he’d imagined Kalinda on a barstool between them, imagined the drunkenness being a source of laughter and consummate relief, Kalinda allowing that sweet, sensuous smile to slip out. That she’d thank them, thank him, with that strange serious tone her voice sometimes took. Maybe he’d touch her thigh under the edge of the bar while Alicia slipped her coat on, maybe he wouldn’t.

He’s not sure what he wants of Kalinda, these days. When he first met her she was the kind of woman he had failed to meet in the Peace Corps and on the Innocence Project in spite of his best efforts—stunning, exotic, enigmatic, brilliant, a mystery he was ready to unlock. But their conversations and work relationships defied Cary’s expectations, expectations he hadn’t even realized were there; his ideas of Kalinda seem always to be shifting, like sand. It only took one night in bed to let him realize, fully, that he wouldn’t change her, couldn’t make her think of him as any kind of home.

The trial hasn’t changed that, it’s just made him understand a little more about why.

Now he’s not sure what he wants, and he’s even less sure what Alicia wants, and still less sure about Kalinda. He wonders where she is right now, if she still lives in that same building where the change-of-address card brought him years ago, or if she left town the instant she recovered her car keys. After this week, he’s pretty sure nothing would surprise him.

Alicia reaches into her pocket and pulls out a vibrating phone. Cary looks at her attentively until she says, “Hi, honey.” Alicia holds up one finger and then continues talking to one of her kids. “It’s in the cabinet over the sink. No, the one on the right. … And what? Oh, tell your Uncle Owen to shut up. … Soon. No, I’m just out with Cary, we had kind of a tough case— … Yeah, we won. … No, honey, I’m glad too. Different case. … Grace, I’ll be home soon, I promise. And we will have time to talk this weekend, I promise you that. … I know, honey. I’m sorry. … Love you.” She looks at the phone in her hand, then raises an eyebrow at Cary. “I think she just went through at least five moods in the course of that phone call.”

Cary doesn’t say anything.

“I had to tell my kids about the case, they know Kalinda. I mean—not the defense, but I had to tell them it was happening.”

“I know,” Cary says. He’s certainly not passing judgment on that particular choice.

They nurse their drinks in silence for a while, Cary relieved to see that Alicia is sipping rather than taking her fourth shot. 

“I didn’t enjoy it,” Alicia said, apropos of nothing.

“Neither did she,” Cary answers.

Alicia sighs.

“Anyway, yeah, you did, a little.” He smiles. “You like winning.”

“I do like winning.” Alicia raises her shot glass. “To Pyrrhic victories,” she says with a light smile. Cary grins and clicks his glass against hers. They drink, and then Cary’s gaze drifts from Alicia to the opposite end of the bar, where he looks at nothing. A few women in their late twenties clustering at the corner, one in an open leather jacket, showcasing small, pointy breasts beneath a low-cut greenish top.

“What am I supposed to do now?” Alicia asks.

“How the hell am I supposed to know that, Alicia?”

Cary checks his phone again. There’s no response to his texts, but he wasn’t really expecting one.


	8. Chapter 8

The offices of Florrick, Agos & Associates are prettier than Kalinda expected. Utilitarian, nothing like the no-nonsense luxe that defines Lockhart/Gardner, but put together well. The walls are a pale, pearly gray, laid out to showcase floor-to-ceiling windows at the ends of corridors. The receptionist, even, looks somewhat more relaxed than the girl at Lockhart/Gardner, whose name Kalinda always forgets anyhow.

“Excuse me,” says Kalinda, and the girl looks up immediately, scrubbed blonde face alight.

“Yes, can I help you?”

“Can you direct me to your accounting office, please?” Kalinda smiles, ingratiating.

“I’m not sure Mr. Hayden is in,” the girl says. “He might have left for the day.”

Kalinda glances down at her phone and, indeed, it’s later than she thought, later than she planned. “I’ll just pop into his office and check, then, if I may?”

“I can call him. Give me a second,” says the girl. A slightly perturbed expression has appeared on her fresh face; Kalinda wonders if she’s been recognized. She hasn’t bothered to find out what kind of coverage there was while she was in jail, but there must have been profiles, articles, daily coverage, recaps on the local news. 

She’d meant to get here earlier, maybe even truly early, when both Cary and Alicia were likely to be in court for one thing or another. But it’s gotten harder and harder to leave her apartment at all, never mind in a timely manner.

Kalinda went back to work two days after the verdict, as soon as she’d slept and showered alone enough to slough the weeks in jail from her skin. The glass halls had been alarming, all the walls alive with eyes, and Kalinda had hardly opened her laptop before Diane said, “Kalinda, do you have a moment?” and Kalinda followed her through her office’s double doors.

“We … weren’t expecting you so soon.” Diane’s voice was as chocolate-rich as it always was. Kalinda realized she had missed hearing that voice, so much so that she could almost block out what it was obviously saying.

“I know.”

“Kalinda, this firm has suffered—significant blows to its reputation recently,” Diane said, every consonant a pearl between her lips. “Your—circumstances were an obstacle, to say the least, and we’re doing the best we can to get back on our feet. I know you’re doing the same yourself, and I appreciate that, but I’m afraid … we’re going to need some … time.”

“Just wait a bit, K,” Will said gently. Kalinda hadn’t even heard him slip in behind her, which itself was alarming even on these carpeted floors, among these smoothly oiled hinges. “Give us a month or so, let it get out of the news.”

Diane nodded.

Kalinda nodded.

“We want you back,” Will said. He met Diane’s eyes over Kalinda’s head, and Kalinda didn’t have to wonder what conversations had taken place while she was gone.

Kalinda had barely gotten the word “Thanks” out before she was out of Diane’s office door. She heard Will’s voice, “We’ll call you,” and she was glad she wasn’t looking at his face as he said it. She was finding elevators difficult, and so she’d opted for the twenty-seven flights of stairs. She passed only one person on her way down, a delivery boy from the twelfth floor smoking a joint that he tapped out hastily. Kalinda rolled her eyes at him, which helped to keep the tears in.

“I’m sorry,” says the girl now, hanging up the phone. “I tried twice. I guess he’s gone for the day. I can make you an appointment with him for tomorrow if you want.”

“No, I—”

“Kalinda?”

It’s Alicia, of course; who else would it be? She says, “What are you doing here?” and hurries down the hall towards Kalinda, black pumps brushing against the carpet.

Kalinda’s finding it a little hard to breathe, but she manages, “Just came to settle my accounts,” she says, and she thinks it sounds calm.

The girl at the desk adds helpfully, “Mr. Hayden’s gone for the day.”

Alicia’s eyes widen, and Kalinda watches her put it together. “No,” she says. “Kalinda, no.”

“Just send me the bill, then.” Kalinda turns quickly to go.

“Wait, Kalinda.”

Kalinda would be out the door, wants to be out the door. She hates that Alicia’s voice, in spite of it all, still holds her hostage, that the experience of the trial has only made it worse. Coldness starts to creep into her veins again, like saline.

“Come with me,” says Alicia, quietly. “Please.”

Hating every step, Kalinda follows her. A few turns, and they’re in a corner office with cream-colored trim, two floor-to-ceiling bookcases, everywhere rich traces of leather. The windows look out over the lake and towards the south, and the door, which Alicia closes behind her, is solid, oak or something like it, not the ultrasleek glass and steel of Lockhart/Gardner. Alicia’s done well for herself. Kalinda considers saying that, but it would involve opening her mouth.

Alicia inhales deeply. “We took your case because we wanted to. Because you asked. We don’t expect anything from you.”

Kalinda says, quietly, “I’m not going to owe you anything, Alicia.”

“You don’t owe us anything,” says Alicia. “We—we didn’t even track the billable hours. Except for Robyn’s, and she’s already been paid.”

Kalinda doesn’t want to hear Robyn’s name. Robyn gets to work, gets up and investigates every morning, while Kalinda is trapped in her apartment with a rotating cast of ghosts. They crowd her bedroom, trying to crush close to her while avoiding each other, demanding Leela’s attention and hers. It takes hours and hours to shake them, hours and hours to leave. If she could have just come in the morning, she wouldn’t be here right now, barely able to look at Alicia, barely able to think.

“I was represented by Florrick, Agos and Associates, and I would like to settle my account.” Kalinda slides her checkbook from the pocket above her left breast.

“Cary would tell you the same thing, Kalinda,” Alicia says, as if that’s an argument. “We won’t accept it.”

“So now you’ve learned to leave a check alone?”

The words are out before Kalinda even understands them herself. She could have stayed Kalinda, steady and fierce, without Nick; it wouldn’t even have been difficult. If she hadn’t needed Alicia, hadn’t been desperate for the contact, for her favor.

Alicia stares at her, and Kalinda sees for the first time that she’s pale even for Alicia, that the lines around her eyes look carved into her skin.

“Kalinda, I—” Alicia stops and swallows. Kalinda stares impassively. Alicia’s facial expression is familiar: Alicia in pain, Alicia struggling to protect herself. Kalinda can’t believe that expression ever used to scare her.

“Yeah?” she says when the silence goes on too long.

“What did you mean?” Alicia waits, and Kalinda waits as well, because she doesn’t feel like figuring out what Alicia is talking about. “Why did you do it?”

Oh. “I didn’t do it,” says Kalinda, feigning calm. “Don’t you remember, Alicia? I was acquitted by a jury of my peers.”

“Cary said …” Words seem to click in Alicia’s throat. She tries again, “You said …” but she doesn’t seem to have any more success with that sentence.

It’s satisfying to see Alicia struggle. Kalinda watches. She’s sweating a little, feels a layer of it between her skin and shirt, but the worst of that early burst of panic has subsided.

“Kalinda, I didn’t—I just—” Kalinda almost likes it, the contrast between courtroom Alicia and this one, except that she doesn’t want to think about courtroom Alicia, not even for a second. “I was so afraid for you. You didn’t belong in there. We had to—any way we could.”

Kalinda isn’t going to discuss this. She thinks she belonged in jail as much as she’s ever belonged anywhere else. She doesn’t think anyone “had to” do anything; she thinks they all made choices, with consequences that she, like Alicia, is going to have to endure. Alicia leans forward and touches her lips to Kalinda’s.

Kalinda freezes.

Alicia continues, gently, so gently that Kalinda has to part her lips, let Alicia’s tongue slip in and meet it with her own. Kalinda feels vibrations deep in her groin and her throat, shooting up through her skin. She thinks she might panic. She thinks she might cry. It’s been so long since she’s wanted a kiss like she wants this. She knows exactly how long it’s been, almost to the day. She wants to stop, she doesn’t want to remember. Alicia’s hand rests on the back of her neck, tangles in her hair, and Kalinda touches Alicia’s knee simply to keep her balance. She’s wanted this for too long and it’s been too long since she wanted it. Alicia is here and alive and safe, not curled bloody in a trunk beneath a kilo of cocaine, not abandoned against some ancient sycamore. Kalinda can feel every breath against the roof of her mouth, every breath gusting across her pores. Alicia is warm beneath Kalinda’s hands, and Alicia kisses Kalinda’s neck and Kalinda sighs and her eyes fly open.

“Don’t,” Kalinda whispers. The word hurts. Everything hurts.

Alicia looks at her, face pallid and shocked. Kalinda wonders, fleetingly, what she herself looks like. “Kalinda, I didn’t—”

“I can’t,” Kalinda says. “Not now—I can’t.” Those are all the words she can manage. She stands, not entirely confident of her legs. Alicia watches with that same wounded, struggling expression on her face.

“Tell Mr. Hayden,” Kalinda manages, “that I—I’ll be writing to him ab-about the bill.”

She turns and somehow succeeds at opening Alicia’s door, at navigating down the hallway and leaving Alicia behind her. She somehow smiles at the fresh blonde at the front desk, somehow once again chooses the stairwell rather than the elevators, knowing she can’t go in there, can’t watch doors slide closed.

Somewhere around the third floor, Kalinda pauses on a landing, the metal knob on the banister smooth against her palm. She closes her eyes, runs fingers over her lips and breathes.


	9. Chapter 9

Though she hears scuffling inside, Alicia isn’t even sure the door is going to open. She’s not even sure why she’s here, except that she’s worried about Kalinda. She doesn’t think she should be alone.

_She’s been alone for two weeks_. The thought comes into Alicia’s head unbidden. She shakes it off and waits. She’s wanted to come for several days, but not until early this morning did Grace, Zach, and Peter leave for a few days at the capital, Alicia begging off due to all the cases that Kalinda’s trial had postponed. She’d tried an hour or so of work, but before she knew it she was behind the wheel, following directions she had no idea she knew.

She knocks again, puzzled and impatient. Kalinda’s inside, avoiding her. Avoiding who the hell knows what else.

“Come on,” Alicia says out loud, leaning her forehead on the door as she taps. She sounds whiny. She isn’t sure what she’s whining about.

Suddenly she hears a click. She rights herself just as the door opens, and Kalinda is standing in the doorway. She’s wearing a black skirt and a deep purple blouse, and she’s barefoot, a few inches shorter than Alicia’s always thought she was.

Kalinda looks at Alicia for a second, and Alicia withers under the scrutiny. She’s tired; she feels bandy-legged from standing in heels for too long, and she knows her shoulders are slumping.

Kalinda turns away, silent, and walks towards the windows that line her apartment’s back wall. Alicia slips inside, closing the door behind her.

“Kalinda,” she says to the other woman’s back.

Kalinda doesn’t answer, doesn’t turn. In the grayish-yellow light that leaches up from the Chicago streets, her silhouette is sharp and fragile, like a shadow puppet.

“I wanted to see you,” Alicia continues quietly, hearing the words rise from her lips like someone else’s lines in a movie. Kalinda doesn’t say anything. Alicia doesn’t know what she’s doing here, but she couldn’t leave Kalinda alone and empty, not like this. Alicia’s hardly looking at the apartment, it’s hard to take her eyes off the fragile shadow figure that dominates the living room, but she feels its harsh serenity, everything minimalist and angular and clean.

_What are you doing here?_ Alicia asks herself, but she’s so focused on Kalinda that there isn’t time to answer, not really.

“Kalinda, I …”

Alicia wants to say she’s worried about Kalinda, but she doesn’t know how Kalinda would take it, and it isn’t really what she means, anyway. She stares at the lovely shadow backlit by the window, then steps out of her own pumps. She’s not sure why, except her feet hurt. The floor is smooth and slippery beneath her stockings.

She comes behind Kalinda, knowing Kalinda can feel her presence, knows she’s there. Tentatively, she lays both her hands down on the other woman’s shoulders. She swears that through the blouse and whatever’s underneath it she can feel Kalinda’s thin and delicate skin, her sharp, straight bones.

“Kalinda,” Alicia says again, but she doesn’t know how the sentence ends and Kalinda’s face stays turned away from her, focused on the darkened windows of the buildings across the street. She’s no longer a silhouette, Alicia can see the colors and textures that compose her outfit and her form.

Slowly, Alicia presses herself against Kalinda’s back. She feels her torso shift, cleaving to Kalinda’s.

Slowly, Kalinda leans back against her.

Alicia’s breath leaves her all at once, sharply.

Alicia runs her hands up and down the length of Kalinda’s arms, down to where they fold and lock beneath Kalinda’s breasts. She takes Kalinda’s hand between hers and runs her fingers along the rigid bones. The skin on Kalinda’s palm is firm and tender. Alicia brings the hand up to her lips, holds it there. A light vibration goes through her as she does so.

Kalinda shakes her head back and forth, slowly, her hair brushing beneath Alicia’s chin.

Alicia brings two hands, her own and Kalinda’s, to Kalinda’s right breast. She feels the room expand around them, wide and bare and waiting. Kalinda pushes up against their hands, a tiny movement. Alicia’s other hand glides slowly down Kalinda, her waist, her hip, her thigh. She brings her lips to Kalinda’s neck lightly, tasting sandalwood and salt.

Kalinda shakes her head again. Alicia keeps her hands where they are and kisses along Kalinda’s neck, beneath her ear, the base of her skull.

Alicia isn’t sure what she thought she was doing here, but it certainly wasn’t this. 

Cautiously, she plays with Kalinda’s blouse, untucks it fully from her shirt, slides her hand beneath it. She teases her fingers at the waistband of Kalinda’s skirt, shocked by the smoothness of her belly. Kalinda breathes deeply, sending a rush of warmth to Alicia’s hand.

She wraps her other arm around Kalinda, holding her, and lets her fingers glide a little lower.

Kalinda tucks her head against Alicia’s neck and shoulder. Alicia can feel every bone in Kalinda’s face, feel Kalinda’s breath tumble rough and wet over her flesh.

Alicia’s fingers move lower, quicker, more urgently. She feels her own mouth open, hears her own thin sigh. She’s never needed anything like this. She pulls Kalinda still a little closer, holds her still a little harder, the fingers of her left hand working nonstop.

Finally a sound escapes Kalinda, a whine muffled by Alicia’s shoulder that Alicia still somehow recognizes as her name.

“Ah—Ah—Alicia—”

The word ends on a higher pitch, then a sharp intake of air, and Kalinda bucks, so violently Alicia’s startled. She keeps holding Kalinda as she trembles, and when the movement finally stills Alicia turns Kalinda in her arms, feels the press of Kalinda’s breasts just beneath her own. It takes a moment or two before Kalinda’s arms wrap around Alicia’s back.

They breathe together. Alicia closes her eyes, nuzzles her face in the now-messy knot of Kalinda’s hair. There are no lights on in the room, and Alicia feels ensconced in that strange set of city reflections, between dark and light.

Kalinda leans back, looks up at Alicia, tugs at her elbows, not pulling away, not letting go. Her eyes are huge and bright, maybe a little too bright. She cocks her head towards a door that must be the bedroom, and Alicia nods and follows Kalinda’s tentative steps, her quiet lead.


	10. Chapter 10

“Damn.” Cary exhales heavily as he leans back, the fall of his head cushioned by the pillows that he’s stacked against the headboard.

He doesn’t know what he was expecting when he answered the door, but it certainly wasn’t this.

Kalinda gazes down at him for a second. She’s as stunning as she always is, but as Cary’s focus comes back, she still seems oddly blurred.

“You okay?” Cary asks.

She nods.

“You sure?”

Another nod.

“Do you want me to …” He slides his hand down her side, over the curve of her hip, adoring the tenderness of her flesh against his fingertips.

She smiles slightly and shakes her head no. She lies down on his chest, her hair tickling his jawline. He feels the weight of her as he inhales and exhales.

It only takes a few minutes for Cary’s mood to sour. It’s like he’s a pillow.

“What, Kalinda?” he says.

She turns her body so that she can face him, still leaning against his chest. She seems to be studying his jaw rather than his eyes. She doesn’t say anything for a while, and then finally, “Sorry.”

Cary doesn’t know how to respond to that. “I mean, if you want, I can …” Somehow, even after everything that’s just happened, he feels uncomfortable gesturing. His hand flops uncertainly in the air.

“I know you can,” she says. Her smile is tender and distant. “But no. Thank you. I’m all right.”

“Whatever else you are, Kalinda, you are not all right.”

She keeps looking at him, her expression unchanged but her eyes suddenly with a little more fire, as if daring him to prove himself or take it back. Cary is not about to do either of those things.

“I’m not complaining, but you wanna tell me why you’re here?”

She shrugs, insolently, which annoys him more than anything so far. He’d like some acknowledgment, some sign that his questions and his presence matter. “Wanted some company.”

“So that’s all this is?”

“That’s not insignificant.” Kalinda looks at him fully this time, willing him to understand something, it seems. But he doesn’t understand it.

“I’m not always going to be here whenever you ‘want company,’ you know.” Cary almost spits the words out, and almost regrets it. He keeps forgetting she’s not even two weeks out of jail, that even solitude must be terribly confusing after that kind of confinement. He also keeps forgetting she’s committed murder.

“I know,” Kalinda says. Something shrinks back in her expression, folding itself into her eyes. “But thanks. For being here this time.” She bites down on her lip, hard enough that Cary wonders if she’s hurt herself. Their breath falls into a slow, synchronized rhythm, syncopated with the ceiling fan.

“You back at Lockhart/Gardner?” he asks, to say something different, to give them both some kind of out.

She shakes her head. “Not yet.”

“Sorry.”

“Yeah.”

“If we have anything …”

She shakes her head again. “You won’t. Not for months. You know that.”

Cary does know that it’s true, that it will be months if not years before they have clients enough to supply work for two investigators, but he also wonders if she’d accept any work that he and Alicia offered.

“You talked to Alicia?” he asks.

She starts to shake her head, then changes her mind and nods, slowly.

“What does that mean?”

“It means I talked to her, Cary,” she says sharply, too sharply.

Her facial expression is simultaneously bare and ferocious, and suddenly, Cary realizes he can read it, or at least part of it. He responds slowly. “I don’t think that’s what it means.”

Several possible scenarios are unfolding in his head at once, and none of them make him comfortable. He doesn’t like the thought of his partner and his whatever-Kalinda-is—his friend, his lover, his client?—even being in the same room together right now, doesn’t trust either woman with the other’s volatility. But the two seconds he gets of staring into Kalinda’s wide eyes before she turns away from him lead him to understand that, one way or another, it is already too late for his concern to be meaningful.

Kalinda rolls off of Cary, lying down on her side on the pillow beside him, exposing the arc of her back. Cary brushes a hand up and down her spine, not sure what else to do.

“What do you want?” he says softly.

Kalinda shrugs. He watches the muscles of her shoulders knit together as she does it. Then she says, “I want to go back to work.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I know. But it is what I want.”

“I know.” A few loose, frizzy strands of hair are trailing down the back of Kalinda’s neck, and Cary finds himself a bit transfixed by them. He pushes the sleek gray comforter a little further over Kalinda. She pulls on it in a way he interprets as gratitude.

“What am I supposed to do now, Cary?” she says, her voice muffled over her shoulder.

Cary wishes women would stop asking him that.


	11. Chapter 11

“Good,” says Alicia as soon as she sees her.

That seems, to Kalinda, a strange way to begin, and she doesn’t know what to say to Alicia anyway. If she’d had anything to say, she would have contacted her. Alicia should know that.

But Alicia just says, “Can we talk somewhere?”

An hour or so ago Kalinda had been texting Will: _She was there._ She’d forwarded the photograph, a smile playing at the corners of her lips. Barbara Smythe, wife of the plaintiff in Lockhart/Gardner’s current defamation suit, was in fact at the ceremony in question, and Kalinda now had the evidence to prove it.

She wasn’t technically back at work yet, a fact that was still upsetting if she focused on it, but last week an email to her Lockhart/Gardner account with two confidential attachments read simply, _Can you look into this?_ She’d done exactly that, sent her findings to Will, and since then he’d been sending her small tasks, bits and pieces of cases that needed her skills. Ravenous, Kalinda caught each table scrap with an open mouth. She was glad she and Will knew each other the way they did, glad that he could sense her gratitude even when she couldn’t say anything to him.

The Lockhart/Gardner work hadn’t been getting her out of the apartment, at least not much—they were still reluctant to risk having clients see her in action, which she supposed she understood—but it was getting her out of her head, at least most of the time. Working stilled and smoothed something in her, something that had been jumbled since the night the warrant was issued for her arrest.

Maybe even earlier.

_Hey._ Nick jostled her shoulder then. _Hey. You sorry?_

Kalinda pressed her lips together; she’d learned by now that nothing good would come of answering. He would pass in a minute; he was leaving faster, these days.

But the question lingered. Since the night Alicia visited, since Kalinda became familiar with the details of her body, it had slipped into her nightmares. Alicia’s corpse appeared scarred at the foot of a tree, waiting patiently for Kalinda to discover it, for Kalinda to break, completely, at last. Nightmares were quicker, these days, easier to wake up from and easier to recognize as dreams, but it was still quite enough to keep her on edge.

So she wasn’t sorry, in spite of it all. She didn’t know how to be. But she was not going to give Nick the satisfaction of telling him so.

Not that it mattered what she told him or not. _Didn’t think so. Cold-blooded. I told you, baby, we were a perfect match._

She waited for the wave of sickness to pass. Fortunately, her phone buzzed with Will’s response: _You’re the best, K._

It broke Nick’s hold, and that meant she only had to wait for Rosa to arrive and the worst of the day would be over. And there was part of Kalinda that always looked forward to seeing her, but unlike Nick, the ghost Rosa didn’t even recognize her, just stared at her until she was gone.

Kalinda guessed it had been too long, guessed she didn’t really look like Leela anymore.

She wondered what she did look like. She’d been avoiding mirrors.

_Let me know what’s next,_ she answered Will.

It was dark by then, the crisp early evening of a Chicago winter. And that's usually when Kalinda leaves the house, when she likes to. There’s a sweet anonymity she can slip into—a bar, a park, someplace everyone’s looking and no one really sees, really bothers to see. She slid a jacket over her shoulders, slipped out the door, slid into the elevator. She felt she was rewarding herself for the day, the first time in a while she’d known she deserved it.

She turned right out the doorway, rounded a corner, and although everything should have, nothing could have prepared her just then for Alicia Florrick.

Alicia, who watches her now, waiting for a response as if it’s perfectly natural for her to be here.

“We can talk here,” Kalinda finally says.

“It’s cold.”

Kalinda likes that it’s cold, but clearly Alicia doesn’t. She offers, “We could walk.”

They try that for a couple of blocks, but neither woman speaks. Kalinda doesn’t think it’s her job to; it’s not as though Alicia’s listened to her so far. She doesn’t know what’s holding Alicia back.

Bored, and not wanting to be any more isolated with Alicia—it’s much less safe, somehow, than taking a walk by herself—she turns sharply just before Western and heads back in the direction of her building, where presumably Alicia’s parked, but Alicia follows all the way to her door again. “Kalinda,” she says.

She used to love the name she’d chosen. Now she’s getting tired of it.

“Can I come in?”

Kalinda opens the door to the building, slips in. If Alicia can follow, Kalinda supposes she can come in. Certainly she’s done it before, and Kalinda’s been able to do very little to stop her.

They do the same strange silent dance up to Kalinda’s apartment. Kalinda’s bored already. She watches Alicia watch her, watches Alicia barely make it through the front door before it shuts.

She tires of the silence, of the waiting, of looking at Alicia. “Alicia, why are you here?” she says, walking to the kitchen island.

“Because I think I might have—fallen in love with you.”

The element of surprise. Kalinda has to admit it once again: Alicia’s an excellent lawyer. Kalinda clamps her hand to the kitchen counter and doesn’t know what to say.

“Are you going to say anything?”

Kalinda bites her lip and shakes her head, breathing deeply, trying to make sense of the vibrations that are rocking her from every direction.

“All right.” Alicia sighs. “I—wasn’t expecting it.”

Kalinda is startled by the need to swallow a snorting giggle. She certainly hadn’t been expecting it either.

“But since—” Alicia swallows. Kalinda is still not used to this uncertainty in Alicia, doesn’t know how to process it, how to explain it to herself. “Since all of this, Kalinda, I … I thought that … I realized you …”

Again, there’s this strange, seething pleasure at seeing Alicia struggle for words, something Kalinda doesn’t think she had ever witnessed before her acquittal. It blooms up through Kalinda, unfurling itself around her bones.

“When Cary first said why you did it …” Cary, again, of course. Cary who, though wholly unsuitable as anything he’s ever wanted to be to Kalinda, has always seen through the stillest parts of her. “I didn’t believe it, I didn’t know how to believe it. But I thought about—how you are. And how I am with you. And I …”

There is a silence.

“I’m here,” Alicia says.

There’s a sweet, raw earnestness on Alicia’s face, something Kalinda hasn’t seen since perhaps the first week she knew her. She looks tired and beautiful and anxious, all her words on the table, waiting to see what they become.

And Kalinda is shocked to hear herself speak, more shocked to hear what she says.

“I don’t think I can, Alicia.”


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading, everyone! I hope this satisfies!

Words slip out of Alicia’s mouth before she can check them, stop them. Her voice sounds like sandpaper. “Kalinda—you’ve wanted this. A long time. Haven’t you?”

Kalinda nods, stiffly, her face locked into position.

“And what you … did for me, what you did to him,” Alicia says. There’s been an unspoken understanding since the day of the verdict that she shouldn’t talk explicitly about this, but at the moment she feels all bets are off. “Killing him. That was for me.”

Kalinda nods again.

“Tell me,” Alicia says.

Kalinda looks at her. Her facial expression remains blank, but her eyes are full. “He would have hurt you, Alicia. I couldn’t let that happen. He would have …”

The silence hangs stiffly in the air.

“I had to,” Kalinda says.

It’s far more potent to hear the words than Alicia thought it would be. It takes her a second to collect herself.

“I didn’t figure it out for a while. I mean—about me,” Alicia says. “What I—thought, what I felt.” She loathes every word; it’s been a long time since she laid herself bare like this, and something about her truly detests the fact that Cary was right all along. “But Kalinda … something happened with us, after. That night, or maybe it was already … Didn’t it?”

Kalinda nods.

“So?”

Kalinda looks miserable, not that that really matters. “I can’t.”

“Why the hell not?”

The force of the phrase startles both of them, but Kalinda locks eyes with Alicia anyway. She takes a shuddering breath before she says, “Because it’s too much. I understand now. What you meant, with—with Peter. It doesn’t matter.”

“What doesn’t?” Alicia is confused.

“Whether or not you—meant to hurt me. It doesn’t matter. Not the way it—not the way I wanted it to matter, when I hurt you. Then I wanted you to care what I … But you …” Kalinda shakes her head, one loose hank of hair trembling. “I understand it now.”

Alicia swallows. It hurts her throat.

“You know I did it to keep you safe,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“So?”

“I still don’t know that I wanted to be safe, like this,” Kalinda says. Her voice, too, sounds hoarse. “I—I wanted to decide. You should have let me.”

Alicia stares at her, stares at every inch of the beautiful face and body, willing both herself and Kalinda to understand.

“I’m sorry, Kalinda,” she says, her voice barely audible by the time it reaches her lips. She’s not even sure she is really sorry, not sure she wouldn’t do the same thing again under the same circumstances, but she’s sorry for what it means for them now.

“I know,” Kalinda says.

The air seems to shut—gently, as a screen door shuts in the breeze—around her words. The apartment is quiet, still, in that same almost-alarming way. Alicia hears her own voice, years ago: _I’ve been hurt deeply. I imagine I will heal someday. But for now …_

“What was she like?” Alicia asks. “Rosa?”

She doesn’t know why she asks it now. She waits for Kalinda to lash out, but, “Courageous,” Kalinda says. “She—was the bravest person I knew.” She’s looking past Alicia’s ear, seems to be looking at the window. Alicia can imagine her, the young dead girl in the files from Toronto, unfolding. Brave enough to draw in a young Kalinda—or Leela, or whoever—who, when she considers it, might be the bravest person Alicia knows.

“You think about her now?”

“Yeah,” says Kalinda, and after a minute she adds, “Often. Before—I couldn’t. I didn’t.”

Alicia can’t think of anything else to say just then, and the silence winds around them. She wonders if her life will always be like this, if there will always be something that holds her back from Peter—her husband, in spite of it all a fiercely loving man, who’s willing to give of himself again—and draws her to someone else and yet still restrains her, still prevents her from having what she wants, or even what she wants to try. She wonders if she squandered anything she had to offer lovers in her twenties and thirties, when Peter was philandering and didn’t appreciate it anyway. She wonders if that’s what Kalinda’s sensing, deep down: that Alicia really just doesn’t have anything to give. 

“It’s not that …” Kalinda says, as if Alicia has spoken, then pauses. “I just don’t think I could. Maybe … but not anymore.”

Alicia looks at her, watches her swallow. Her hand is still clamped to the kitchen counter. She’s wearing a black and white dress that Alicia has never seen before, tailored to the curves of her hips, the angles of her shoulders. Her eyes are liquid, her chest rising and falling.

“Okay,” Alicia hears herself saying. “I understand.”

“Th-thanks.”

And Alicia does understand. That’s the worst of it. She understands perfectly. She even understands why, although Kalinda means everything she’s said, she still seems to be hovering dangerously close to tears. Not the same tears Alicia remembers from the courthouse those weeks ago—she had never seen Kalinda cry before then—but tears Alicia recognizes nonetheless. Once they were hers.

“And thank you,” Kalinda says. “And maybe you’re—maybe you were right. If I’d been—I probably wouldn’t have made it.”

Alicia looks at her, and knows she means this, too. Looking back, she can recall none but the one occasion that Kalinda has lied to her.

She remembers the misery of those weeks after, knowing she’d been too hurt to go on, to keep talking to the woman whose friendship had come, slowly, to function as Alicia’s lifeline.

And she considers what for her, those years ago, might have made a difference.

“Okay,” she hears herself saying.

Kalinda’s nod in response moves a little too slowly.

“Kalinda …” Alicia hesitates. “I just need a minute before … do you mind if—if I just—if I stay a little while?”

Though in reality she isn’t that much smaller than Alicia, Kalinda seems to be looking up from a great depth, and her eyes look even bigger than they usually do. Slowly, she nods.

Alicia takes a few tentative steps towards the small sofa near her hip. It somehow looks even newer, even more pristine, than the rest of the apartment. She sits, and it feels stiff, almost untouched.

“I used to have a chair there,” Kalinda says, as if reading Alicia’s gestures. “Instead. I got rid of it.”

“Oh,” Alicia says, not quite sure why this information is relevant. She looks at Kalinda, who is suddenly looking out the window again. An airplane passes overhead, contrails streaking the dark sky above the buildings across the street. Alicia reaches out and touches Kalinda’s hand.

Kalinda looks down, startled, but not as startled as Alicia was afraid she would be. Alicia meets her eyes, then nods to the space beside her on the sofa. She hears Kalinda breathe in and shifts her own gaze, decorously, as Kalinda sits down beside her.

The heat of the other woman close to her—after so many weeks, so much confusion—is almost too much for Alicia, but she simply waits, lets her exhalations meet Kalinda’s rhythm. Chicago gleams off the reflective surfaces scattered in the apartment, making Alicia feel as if they’re encased, as if all that’s in here with her is Kalinda. She reaches for Kalinda’s hand again, that unexpected heat surging up again when she takes it and holds on.

Kalinda looks at her and doesn’t say anything.

Alicia is remembering the trial, the pain on Kalinda’s face and the terror that ran through Alicia in response, which she’d done her best to ignore. She’s remembering two years of tequila shots, the potent relief when she heard her lost daughter’s voice from the front door and the upheaval when she learned, the next week, that Kalinda had brought her home. There are so many times Kalinda has been beside her when she couldn’t feel what she feels now, the gentle current running between them. Kalinda must have felt it the whole time.

“Kalinda,” Alicia tries.

“Not now,” Kalinda says.

Alicia looks at her face, now. She’s concentrating on something. Alicia strokes Kalinda’s fingers with her thumb, trying not to breathe too hard. Kalinda can’t ask her to leave, not yet. Not now. She tries to focus where Kalinda’s looking—her attention seems to be turned to a very specific spot—but nothing’s there.

Even without looking, she knows the shape of Kalinda beside her, every inch of the other woman’s form. So she feels the physical shift just a second before Kalinda’s head drops onto her shoulder. She’s just the right height for it—neither of them really has to adjust.

So Alicia doesn’t. She waits, then brings her left arm to rest around Kalinda’s waist. She likes the feel of the other woman beside her, the springloaded muscles she’s never felt before.

“Okay?” she says to Kalinda, keeping her voice low, not wanting to break the stillness around them.

“Okay,” Kalinda says.


End file.
